


Carefree Healer

by BlackMajjicDuchess



Series: Namesake [21]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Emotions, F/F, First Crush, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-06
Updated: 2015-07-06
Packaged: 2018-04-07 22:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4279689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackMajjicDuchess/pseuds/BlackMajjicDuchess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I got the idea in my head one day to bring some of the Naruto characters face-to-face with the thing they were named after for the first time. I thought it might be fun. Also accepting challenges!</p><p>Stories will be posted separately but as part of the Namesake series.</p><p>Part 21: Carefree Healer</p><p>Nono was trained to deny her feelings, conditioned to forget the poison of her own blood. Order yearns for chaos, and 'she' was just that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carefree Healer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shy Girl 1918](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Shy+Girl+1918).



> To issue a challenge, just comment on one of the stories in the series with the name you'd like to see done. The only stipulation is that it HAS to be a name that has a meaning, and it has to be a meaning that is something one can encounter. Example: Madara means "spots." What the heck am I supposed to do with that? On the other hand, Naruto's name refers to some kind of fish cake, which is something he could confront somehow.
> 
> Nono Yakushi challenge from guest Shy Girl 1918
> 
> Nono = Carefree, careless  
> Yakushi = Medicine user

* * *

She was trained to deny her feelings, conditioned to forget the poison of her own blood. Like how the heart raced with excitement, or fear, or pain. How embarrassment could corrupt wit, or how arrogance could make one careless. She was drilled time and again in the art of feeling nothing. It was her profession to purge the mind and spirit of external distractions and fill herself up with the mission. There was to be nothing but the Village and her ability to serve it. Her job was to hone those abilities according to her strengths and further the interests of Konoha, even if Konoha herself did not believe it was needed. Nono was a blank slate of shinobi ready to write her fate. 

So it shouldn’t have been possible, but there it was. Nono was in love.

Deep in the soul of the earth, the Stone Village built a library. More accurately, the ancestors of the ancestors of the Stone Village built a library. And the ancestors of the Stone Village expanded it. Age after age passed as generations of shinobi dug ever deeper. She could see it in the quite literal writing upon the wall. Here and there kanji and dates scrawled of all the shinobi who had spent time digging. The archive dove miles down into the stone, through the bedrock, and into the fabric of time. Of life. 

It was as silent as the grave in that nameless library. The layered colors of stone were gorgeous in the dim lighting. _She_ was nothing. A whisper of a fraction of a blip in the timeline. The massive collection of books was as ancient as it was deep, and the shinobi of Iwa had spent just as long thieving for it as they had building it. Scrolls, tomes, and tablets in languages she had never seen were neatly stacked and catalogued as far as the untrained eye could see.

It was a careless miscalculation that dumped Nono through one of the ventilation shafts and sent her sprawling across its floor. Her first panicked thought was that her cover was blown, that she’d stumbled into a secret meeting and was due to have her throat slit. 

But now that she’d _seen_ , she couldn’t label it a mistake. There was not a scrap of knowledge in existence she didn’t want, and this place was haunted with wisdom. Since the day she’d found it, she hadn’t left. Of course, Iwa’s secret archive had nothing to do with the mission that brought her there, but she didn’t have a deadline and saw no harm in some light reading. The opportunity was too perfect to pass up. She just couldn’t.

Tucked as she was into the cradle of the earth, the weeks slithered past, the briefest of moments in the scheme of things. What did a few days matter versus the endless reach of prehistory? Nono survived on her rations and a wisely installed drinking fountain, scouring histories and rediscovering priceless artifacts from worlds long gone. Either Iwa was finally done building their library or were too busy to bother with the books it held, for not a soul stepped a toe into that place in that time. 

Until someone did. For the first and last time, Nono was caught wholly unprepared.

“Oh, hey! New face!” she trilled into the powerful silence. Just like that, the spell was irreparably broken, shattered into shrapnel that echoed off the timeless walls. The words and the voice that made them were so jarring that Nono spent one brief, flaring moment of panic simultaneously trying not to have a heart attack and mourning the loss of the silent magic this place invoked. 

Then, with one violent shove, Nono sent her self rocketing back into the cupboard and donned her assumed mask. “Oh. Hi.” 

She laughed. “Did I scare you? It can be pretty quiet down here.”

Nono blinked, finally remembering what it was like to interact with another human being. She chuckled. “Yeah, I suppose you did. I was studying.”

“You are? Oh good! That’s what I was coming down here to do, too.” She dropped a hand on the back of Nono’s chair and stared up into the eaves. Her appreciative sigh was the right kind of sound to fill such a chasm. “I love it here. It’s so nice to see that not everyone has lost an appreciation for a good book.”

Nono caught herself smiling. The real kind.

“I’m Zan.” She held out her hand.

Nono processed her mission directive. Zan was not a target. The probability of her being related to the target or informing on her was slim to none. Her objective was not compromised, and would not be delayed or endangered by indulging this girl. 

She could not, however, be a friend. Such an association was forbidden. Those were the rules. And there were _so many_ rules. 

“Noa,” she returned, reaching for the hand to shake it. 

To her surprise, though, Zan tugged her out of her chair and hugged her instead. “Handshakes are so weird, don’t you think?” she wondered aloud. “Why judge a person on the strength of their grip, rather than the reflections of the heart?” Zan’s hand pressed in between her shoulder blades, the other curling around the cap of Nono’s shoulder. “I’ve always thought that was a silly concept.” Her voice dropped to the kind of whisper that gave Nono shivers. “Don’t you?”

It was too much all at once, to be ejected from the complete silence into this loud world with warm and friendly smiles and too-close hugs. Such an incident hardly afforded her the time to tell her instincts not to react. She’d never been hugged before, and as such things would go, she rather liked it. Coincidentally, she had experience shaking hands, so it wasn’t difficult to agree. “I do.”

As if hugs were an everyday occurrence—and for her, perhaps they were—Zan released her and pulled up a chair, wood shrieking across smoothly polished stone. She tugged a book out of her pack and turned it to a dog-eared page, already talking a mile a minute. One sided conversation revealed that Zan was a genin, already interested in medical ninjutsu and apparently quite talented. Nono had never thought about such a thing before, but supposed it must be possible. Chakra was the essence of life. It made logical sense that it could be used to restore life. Listening to Zan was like reading a different kind of book. She spurted information on anatomy and medicine in a lyrical voice worthy of the silence she’d destroyed. 

Nono didn’t think she stopped talking. For three days they shared the library, for Zan had packed rations, too. It was clear from her preparations that she was a regular of the quiet study space, which made Nono wonder if she talked to herself when she was alone. Nono was grateful not to have had to speak. Listening suited her fine. Better, really. She absorbed knowledge and gave up nothing on herself.

Until Zan asked it of her. “Oh, silly me. Here I’ve been blathering about complete nonsense. I’m sure you’ve got tons of interesting things to say. You’re not from here, are you?”

She’d gotten used to not speaking. Sudden prompting yanked the rehearsed lies right off her tongue. “Sort of. I grew up in one of the villages on the outskirts of the Land of Earth. So in a way, I’ve lived here my whole life, but I’ve never been to the Village Hidden in the Stone.” She smiled one of the fake smiles. “I know I’m a little old for it, but I think I’d like to be a genin.” She was actually seasoned Anbu, despite being only fourteen, but they’d always told her she was exceptional. She looked young, anyway. 

It was then that Nono realized Zan was staring at her. It was just after that Zan shrieked with delight and pounced. Shinobi training had her moving her limbs in such a way to avoid awkward angles, going limp just before impact to prevent breakage. Zan’s arms wrapped around her ribcage with crushing force, and the delighted squeal happened right into Nono’s ear. “Oh please, Noa! It would be so much fun!”

She was too close. Her hair smelled like sun drenched honey and her body was too soft and too warm. Nono knew only cold and darkness. Her heart no longer remembered how to love. But in that moment, it remembered how to dance, and that was enough. It was an odd thing, but since it was new and interesting, she chose to study it and remained still, analyzing. She quantified the pressure against her chest, labeled the scent of the girl, whispered her name through her thoughts like a quiet song. It should have been awkward, but she was surprisingly calm. Then she caught Zan’s eyes—storm-grey and just as unsettled—boring into her skull. 

Nono gazed back, wondering what she saw in there. The eyes were said to be the windows of one’s soul. If that was true, did Zan see emptiness? Bleakness? 

She didn’t have to wonder long, for the sweet-tempered girl’s lips curved into a smile and her eyes drifted to half mast. “You must think I’m a crazy person,” she intimated, one shoulder brushing her own as she shrugged. “I’m not crazy, I’m just”—she relaxed, soft lines meshing together.

It was much more comfortable that way.

“I’m just”—she began again, faltering as before. Her hands fanned out across Nono’s collarbone. She shrugged again, then leaned down and brushed their lips together. 

Nono’s heart leapt at the touch, and a torrent of tabled emotions poured forth. There were too many to name, clamoring for attention—Zan’s, not her own—charging through veins and stealing the breath from her lungs. It was rage and it was lust and it was ecstasy, and it was over as quickly as it started.

“—That,” Zan finished, apparently at a loss for words. She smiled, tapped Nono’s chest where her hands rested, and helped her up. 

And for a wonder, Zan went silent. 

They really did study after that. Zan with her fingers tangled into her auburn hair, her lower lip captured between her teeth. Her eyes remained trained to the page and never left it again. Periodically, her breath escaped her in a heavy sigh as she turned another page. 

Nono studied Zan, for she was the embodiment of everything Nono was not allowed to be nor to have. She was bright, and loud, and so very _alive_. Where Nono was blank of emotions, Zan seemed to be all of them at once. She relived their kiss and reveled in it, but she hadn’t learned enough. This was another compendium of knowledge she hadn’t known. The opportunity was too perfect. Zan was too thrilling. A long silence had passed before she asked, “What is… _that?”_

Zan, lost in thought, was briefly confused. “Hm?” Then her cheeks colored and she smiled crookedly. 

Blushing. It was one of the marvelous human reactions that could not be faked. In her mind, Nono attributed blushing as some kind of magical feat of skill that Zan had and she did not. “I’ve never met anyone like you,” Nono admitted. “I’m… different.”

“Well then. So am I.” She pressed her hand to Nono’s face. It was cold to the touch, but warmed her anyhow. 

It wasn’t what Nono meant. She wanted to tell Zan about how she was broken, bleached of all affection and humanity. How even now she was a fraud, working undercover to try to betray Zan’s home nation. She still would; Foundation shinobi were not allowed the luxury of personal desires. Even if she indulged this one passing fancy, she would complete her mission at all costs. Even if that cost was Zan. She failed to find the words, though, to articulate her shortcomings. Instead, her eyes drifted closed and she leaned into the chilly hand at her cheek. Her senses sharpened on the girl of Stone. Her pulse pounded in her ears. Her face grew hot. Thrill and curiosity warred in her breast. She didn’t _feel_ broken. She didn’t _feel_ empty. 

She felt… a lot of things. Like a dam had broken and the Nakano was crashing through. Torrents of emotion flooded a desiccated system. Nono let it happen, awestruck and amazed, thrilled she could feel that, too. "It's best not to overthink things," she murmured, quashing the harsh discipline of Foundation training. _Just this once,_ she vowed. One taste of joy, and she would no longer hunger for the unknown. 

She told herself that, and she tasted. Lapped and laved and drank it all in. Drank too deeply and became addicted. The timeline crept past, missives came from Konoha, wondering at her prolonged lack of update. She crushed them in her fist without thinking and danced with Zan among the books. She laughed and loved and learned.

The Foundation did not let go so easily, though. Eventually, she would have to answer for her prolonged silence. She still had a mission to complete. One day there would be an ultimatum: Konoha, or Zan. She already knew what she would choose. It couldn't last.

It didn't. 


End file.
